Newport Beach residents may be excused if they lack interest in Measure B, a proposal on the city’s June ballot. But opponents have raised the heat — and the comedy value for those of us paying attention — by stating precisely the opposite of what’s true about the measure.
Measure B would allow residents to directly elect their mayor, abandoning a system in which the job rotates annually among current councilmembers.
The directly elected mayor would have just one new power: he or she would have the ability to place items on the city council agenda without a vote of fellow councilmembers.
That power is modest but important.
At present, adding agenda items requires the support of three councilmembers; for now, there’s only one person in city government who can unilaterally add discussion items to the council’s agenda: the unelected city manager.
Giving a directly elected mayor the opportunity — alongside the council — to place discussion items on the council agenda expands democracy.
There’s another benefit in Measure B. Allowing that mayor to serve for four years provides a level of predictability in the council’s direction. Under the current system, mayors serve just one year — hardly giving them time to direct Newport Beach toward the city’s long-term, strategic goals. In a city at the center of multiple overlapping local, state and federal agencies, experience matters.
That’s Measure B in total. And if Newport Beach residents don’t like their directly elected mayors, the voters can toss them out.
Reading opponents’ claims about Measure B is a walk through bizarro world. One of their recent mailers calls Measure B “deceptive and dangerous.” What’s deceptive is the mailer itself. It says, “Measure B would give the mayor almost total control of the city’s agenda.” We’ve seen that it would, in fact, do nothing of the sort. The mailer says the proposal “would bypass voter approved term limits.” In fact, the opposite is true: while it makes no changes to the terms of councilmembers, Measure B would create stricter term limits on the directly elected mayor.
Perhaps revealing their real motive, the mailer appeals to partisan interest. It cites the Newport Beach Women’s Democratic Club claim that Measure B is “a Republican power grab.”
There’s no evidence to support the outburst, just an assertion that is absurd on its face: the city’s council candidates don’t run as affiliates of any party because these offices are officially (by law, that is) nonpartisan.
Indeed, there’s nothing in Measure B that would stop anyone of any political description — even a member of the deceptive and dangerous Newport Beach Women’s Democratic Club — from running for city mayor.
Desperate times require desperate measures, but in this case the times have produced desperate, thoughtless partisanship from people eager to protect the power of an unelected city manager.
Measure B is an antidote.
David L. Bahnsen is an economist, investor and Newport Beach resident.
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